Shakespeare Didn’t Do SEO

Imagine if Shakespeare were a blogger. Alive in our modern world and publishing his materials on a blog. As he thinks about the material he writes, does he wonder about how many hits that his posts would receive? Would he agonize over what long tail search phrases the search engines would pick up?

Or would he write for the pure joy of creating great content, confident that his incredible works of art would attract readers on its own and bring traffic to his blog? If you could ask Shakespeare the blogger for some advice, would he tell you to write for the human beings or to write for the machines?

Instead of answering this question, let’s tell a story:

Imagine a young struggling writer. He sits at his desk in his studio apartment. The apartment is bare, but for a small dinner table, his bed and a desk.

Sunlight begins to creep in through the window that overlooks this man’s desk. He’s got the lean look of a man who eat’s sparsely. He’s disheveled, unshaven, staring agonizingly at the laptop that sits on the desk in front of him. He has the look of a man who has not slept. Outside, you hear the sounds of the city as it wakes up. The sputtering of a passing car startles the man out of his daydream.

He sits up and looks again at the words on his computer screen:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;

It is the first few lines of a new blog post he was writing.

He can feel the inspiration speaking to him through the words, but he knows that these words would not bring the readers. Alas! It is not search engine optimized! These beautiful words have no meaning to the vast machine that controls your fate! He struggles over his dilemma, to keep these words or to change them, optimize them. His heart tells him these are the words that would inspire man. But in his mind, he realizes that these words would only bring a few hundred visitors to his site, while properly optimized, he could speak to millions.

Slowing his hand creeps towards his keyboard. If you look closely, you could see a slight tremble in his hand. And as his hand makes contact with the laptop, the tremble moves up his arm and you could see it take over his body in a shudder as his finger presses a button. The words disappear to a blank screen. Slowly he begins to type again: (keyphrases in bold added for emphasis)

Suicidal thoughts cross my mind.

Is it more noble to try and overcome hardship?

I’m facing depression from my bad luck.

Is determination enough to overcome bad luck.

Or should I give up and commit suicide?

Would my soul go to the afterlife?

If there is an afterlife, would I dream?

That would be ironic….

The man continues to write, slouched over his keyboard. He moves without excitement, slowly tapping away.

He stops and looks out the window at the city and sighs…

Back to the Present

Is there a great work of art lurking in the recesses of your own mind?

As a blogger, we face this dilemma each time we sit down to write a post. In the back of our minds is always the advice to research your search terms, keep in mind those longtail keyphrase and try to create a careful balance between SEO and readability. Often times, you can stumble across a post that crosses that line of into complete nonsense stuffed with keywords. The search engine brought you to the site, but you read the articles trying to make heads or tails of what the author is saying.

If Shakespeare were alive today, would he be concerned about the machine or the human being sitting behind that computer screen? I would like to think that he would tell you to strive for greatness. He might say that a great work of art will receive recognition and become popular on its own even without SEO.

When you write your blog posts, keep in mind that a machine has no heart. A machine can’t be inspired. A machine can’t feel the love between Romeo and Juliet. It can’t feel the agony of Hamlet or the betrayal of Caesar.

The next time you sit down to write. Think about it as a work of art. Then as you put your hand on the keyboard ask yourself this question:

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31 Responses

You bring up a very good point.. and I do agree with you to some extent.. that there are many things that happen to go viral on the internet because they are simply great and they don't have to do a ton of "SEO" or promoting… but honestly, in my experience, with blogging it's much different. Almost everyone and their brother has a blog lately, and to make your blog stand out from the rest you definitely must have awesome content.. but you can have the best content in the world, and no traffic, and there would be no one to read that content! So you definitely have to promote somehow or another to get people to find and read your blog.. and in my opinion, SEO has been the best way for me to do so. Just my opinion…

Well, there are many ways to promote your content, and I'm not saying that you won't get traffic with SEO. You're definitely right that SEO is one of the best ways to get traffic. But on the flip side of your point, all the SEO in the world won't do anything without good content either. You have to start with good content so that when your traffic arrives they have a reason to stick around or come back.

I love the way you have used one of the greatest wordsmiths of all time and weaved it into this blog post. Brilliant!

I agree with you that if we write quality content with an edge like you have done in this post; SEO will take care of itself. I write for my readers and so far this is working.

As I am in a small niche I am already up against it as have to get the word out about my blog and do this with hopefully writing content-rich posts and blog commenting and interacting within the blogging community.

You make a good point and I have a question. Is there anything preventing us from doing both? I am a newbie. The way I understand search engines to work is they look for keywords in the post, title, and headings. What is wrong with starting with the keywords and crafting a good post that is seach engine optimized? I tend to try to find the synthesis of opposing views and I just want to see if anything is preventing this. Good post though, you got me thinking. And commenting. So it is a really good post.

Hi William,
You can absolutely do both and many people do to great success. In many ways it's an artform in itself to create a great readable SEO post. But if you're faced with a choice, go with quality content over keyword stuffing.

Shakespeare wouldn't need SEO, because he would have become viral and other would have done SEO for him.All the world's a stage

Actually this can happen with anyone, there are websites out-here that have nothing seo in them but they have tons of backlinks just because they provide useful content for people and not for robots, thus people tend to give back more often.

Your mastery with words is great indeed, and if the question is To be or not to be.. I wish you will be 🙂

Awesome analogy! I say screw the search engines. Write for people. They're the ones that will be subscribing to your list and buying from you! Sure, it's not a bad thing to optimize your titles and your text a bit, but I say everyone needs to focus a lot more on providing content that readers want and not that search engines want. It would make for much more interesting reading all across the blogosphere, I think!

Thanks Tristan. You're right that it's ok to do some optimization, but I think that sometimes people work backwards when learning how to blog. They learn all about SEO and writing for search engines and neglect writing quality for human beings. We should all spend more time practicing our writing first and then adding the SEO after we've mastered the quality.

This could be one of the best arguments for writing for humans instead of bots that I've read. I hate visiting a blog that looks to have a ton of potential only to be drowned in a sea of keywords stuffed into each paragraph.

It seems I was here yesterday, but I think it has been a while. The current post tells me you were writing even before writing a blog. Your imagination and expression both are advanced, tells the reader more about you that you are not only a blogger but a real person who has real understanding of yourself and readers.

You are right that search engine will pick up well written content by itself.

Food for thoughts Richard, excellent post. I think if Shakespeare alive, maybe he is scratching his head same as we all do. Some gurus must have spoiled him too :). A passionate blogger write for content and for spread good values and those blogger who motivated by money, you can expect more commercial writing on their blog and optimized for robots rather than human beings.

Great analogy. I love it. It gets even worse though. Your rewrite of Hamlets speech had poor keyword density. He would have to figure out a way to repeat a few phrases a couple of times.

yuck

It certainly is a tough balance getting seo in there without ruining the "flow" and originality of writing. Making an attempt (sometimes) at including seo is a good thing, because it helps to get work found. But if the resulting work is garbage that is simply optimized crap, who really cares.

The work should always come first. If it can them be optimized without ruining ti…great. IF it can't..let it go as is… just my 2 cents/

OK this is the second attempt at a comment after my one yr old daughter decided to pull the plug on my PC mid sentence…D'OH!

This post is one of the best I have read in a while mate, and I honestly think you answered your own question here. If Shakespeare blogged he would write with the same eloquence as I see here, weaving words into a nicely fitting jumper that may not be great for SEO, but with the power of social media and his (your) ability to weave a story – he would succeed all the same.

You are a fantastic writer Richard, and it was a breath of fresh air to read such a well constructed post.

At my first glance towards your blog's title, it just hit me and trigger my attention to read this. Very inspiring indeed! Yeah, its true that what if Shakespeare had reached our generation would he really think about the amount of readers he could attract? or would he just sit by on his room facing his PC and mind only what his heart and soul wanted to express and share to us? Now, I can say that great content is not enough to have a best blog post but also to pour it with your purest and real emotions because I believe as a reader (like me) could really feel how the author wrote it with not only being an informative but also a writer who has a passion and bringing his true emotion and mood in doing an article. 🙂

I guess Shakespeare would be a great blogger 'cause he has some magical power in his words. If we talk about present day bloggers, only those who write with inspiration can be top bloggers and their blogs will become popular and often visited.

Great example, Richard. I think we need to be mindful of SEO concerns, but always write for human eyes.

When it comes to static pages, meta descriptions, image alt tags, etc. then we should try to optimize for search engines. If our categories and tags are both keywords, then we can manage our posts by just reminding ourselves which category our post is meant to be in.

It's ironic how increasing your discoverability can lead to no one wanting to discover you.

Balancing your SEO vs. human attraction is no-doubt a difficult act. Catering to the search spiders while supplying quality contextual goods to your readers is an on-going battle of sorts, but the best place for optimizing your on-site SEO attributes (IMHO) is where the human's don't see (META, backlinks, etc.). When you separate your efforts (like you do with HTML/CSS, structure vs. display) everything else has an easier time of falling into place. Of course it helps if you're passionate about your content's subject matter and you're a decent writer, too.

LinkedIn is the most reputable social media network for professionals nowadays. Anybody looking for a job with major worldwide players (or even small-sized companies) should have a profile there. The thing is that their

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